How to establish serial communication between 3 nRF52840 dongles using mesh.

[Nimish]

Hello everyone,

I want to establish serial communication between 3 nRF52840 dongles using mesh.

Can you suggest me the steps from begining. Also i have read the documentation blog of nordic semiconductor.

I have downloaded nrf sdk for mesh version 2.1 and nrf sdk for mesh version 15. After this tell me how to implement the examples on multiple dongles.

Also i have downloaded nrf connect for pc.

[Nimish]

Hello, I don't have any development kit. Is it possible to establish communication using mesh network between three nRF52840 dongles just by using the dongles?  

[Nimish]

Can you post the image of the connections please. So is it like after programming the dongle via computer we have to remove it from computer and connect it to development kit? My main doubt is how do I test any example (like ble_uart), because after flashing the dongle it stops advertising.

[Bjørn Kvaale]

I believe you will still need to have the dongle connected to a usb port when you are running the mesh. As you can see from the main product page for the dongle, there is no debug support. Since there is no Segger chip on the dongle, there is no segger rtt for logging like it is done in the mesh sdk using a nrf52 dev kit. This is the reason that I have soldered on a 10 pin adapter to the P1 port on the dongle. The 10 pin SWD cable is attached to the debug out port on the 52 dev kit. The dev kit, as you most likely know, has a segger chip & therefore you can debug the dongle via the dev kit.

It should still be possible to set up a mesh network using only dongles, but you would most likely require some dev kits to act as a debugging interface to the dongles. Like I mentioned before, I have gotten the client & server to work on the dongle when the dongle is connected via the dev kit. The dongle does not currently work out of the box when only attached to the usb port (no 10 pin cable attached). I am still trying to figure out why this is the case. I will update the thread when I have any updates.

Here are two pictures of the connection:

If you take a look at sdk 15.1 & search for pca10059 in the examples folder, you can find examples that will work out of the box with the dongle.

Kind Regards,

Bjørn

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Hi,

Do you still wish to use a mesh network or do you want to try the multilink example? I would again recommend to at least buy one 52 dev kit to be able to debug the dongle.